Pimp Your App: Make HandBrake Dock-Worthy
I've tried HandBrake in the past, but never got through importing a single full movie due to painfully slow encoding times. Waiting 5-6 hours to rip a movie wasn't my idea of fun, and as a result, it's been sitting in the "cool but not ready yet" list of apps for a while. Plus, the crazy pineapple icon (pictured in its full glory on left) was yet another reason to trash it as soon as possible. Seriously. And by the way, anyone know why the hell the icon is a pineapple and mixed drink anyway?
Anyway, HandBrake has since been upgraded to "sweet app that now sits in my Dock" status, and I've been happily ripping movies over the past week. What made me change my mind? Two things.
First off, the universal binary is super fast on my new MacBook. (Base model, 1 gig of ram.) I used to get maybe 10-15 fps on my previous 12" Powerbook, which effectively meant outrageously long encoding times. Harnessing the power of the Core Duo chip inside this laptop, HandBrake has been averaging 50+ fps, resulting in about 1:1 encoding times with a second pass (to improve visual quality). This is a huge difference (around twice as fast as the family iMac G5!), and I'm guessing that even further optimizations will be possible in the future. For one, it only seems to use one of the two cores available, and I bet some good speed improvements could be found by delegating things like audio compression to the second core.
Now, even though HandBrake now runs insanely great on this MacBook, don't think that's reason enough for it to get Dock status. After all, I have some taste. Luckily, my friend Tom Stoelwinder recently released a mouth watering replacement icon for both HandBrake and HandBrake lite. Incidentally, I hired Tom to design this blog about 3 minutes after seeing a preview of these icons. Feast your eyes on the successor to the Pineapple, and feel free to download them from Tom's site.
The other part to this makeover is the excellent HandBrake UI replacement by nanovivid, posted on MacThemesForums a few months back. (EDIT: Updated by Nanovivid just today, link is updated as well.) Just drop in these nibs (instructions in the download) and your HandBrake UI will metamorphose from a functional but pretty cluttered app to a, well, functional and only slightly cluttered app. Losing about 30% of this app's body weight is now as easy as drag and drop:
Click to enlarge. Note: Unified interface courtesy of the wonderful Uno.
Hopefully the HandBrake developer, Eric Petit, will wrap in some of these aesthetic improvements into future versions of the app. (I see that as relatively likely, his other application, the minimal BitTorrent app Transmission, recently underwent a pretty massive makeover. One case where the "after" photo looks a helluva lot better than the "before".) But until then, some major cosmetic surgery is as easy as dropping in a few files. Hope you enjoyed this first "Pimp Your App" feature, and look forward to the next one, coming soon... this time featuring Adium, with an updated icon by Adium artist Adam Betts, as well as other UI improvements.
Comments
Up until this point, there have been 38 responses to “Pimp Your App: Make HandBrake Dock-Worthy”:
BOOKMARKED!
Very nice article. I can wait to see what you have in store for us tomorrow!
Phill Ryu
For those of you who do not have experience fully replacing icons, right click (or control+click) on HandBrake, select "view package contents", and drop in the .icns file you download into the resources folder. (And replace the current one.)
This blog is now one of my homepage tabs. props.
I'm a huge fan of handbrake on my intel mac (iMac core duo 20"). I can rip a full cd at 1000kbps in about 30 minutes, which is a HUGE improvement from my G4 1.25 gHz mac mini. I'll take a peek a these interface improvements, but honestly, i dont foresee them as necessary (though they may be cool).
I'll say that you've got a sweet blog going on here, and I'll be adding it to my linkset as well. Nice work, check out my blog if you like...I'm a huge fan of power tools (and more recently, mac power tools) and you might find some stuff you like in my post about some safari development tools i stumbled upon http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/2006/06/29/safari-just-got-a-whole-lot-nicer/
Cheers, and congrats on all of the traffic.
and by full cd i meant full dvd. 1 hour 45 minutes on average, takes about a half hour to rip. On the G4 mini, it took about the length of the movie itself.
Handbrake is a great app as it is, these makeovers are great.
nice page by the way, excelent design I have bookmarked your site.
This icons look great - thanks for the link. I also dig the site design and feel. I'll be back, I'm sure!
your blog has been bookmarked
this is great stuff!
So the app basicly functioned the same (just ran faster on your new mac), but because it got some new icon, and a noobified gui, its super better? Seriously now..
Phill Ryu
Well Peezy, as someone who found HB painfully slow before even on a G5 iMac, I\'m just pointing out that it\'s well worth a second look if you\'ve picked up an Intel Mac recently. And if you\'re gonna take that second look, it can now be made much less painful with a better icon and interface. (And noobified? Hardly, just more compact and space efficient.)
It has a pineapple and a martini in the original Icon because you
used to have time to fly to hawaii and fix yourself a drink or two while it encoded.
Nice tip... and a gorgeously geeky blog design btw!
Phill Ryu
Tim, just hilarious. And Kevin, Eric, Jeff, Dewayne, etc. thanks for the kind words, and hope to see you guys continue to comment! Never a better feeling as a blogger. 
have you tried using mac the ripper?
Being a recent Mac Lover, I am beginning to follow your blog. Thanks to you for your contribution to the Mac community!
The icon is because of the name, Handbreak is a type of drink..
via: http://www.joebartender.com
"Devil’s Handbrake
June 19th, 2006
Equal parts:
Banana Liqueur
Cherry Brandy
Mango Liqueu "
This doesn't explain the pineapple though. (I suppose you could add it...)
(BTW you might want to find a way to notate that Name and EMail are required fields)
You won't get much faster encode speeds by sticking audio compression on the second core. The audio compression usually runs at about 20-30x actual speed, where as the 50fps of the video encode shows it's more like 2x. Audio isn't the drag when it comes to encoding, video is. The video encoder probably has the shit optimised out of it (seeing how the codecs have been around forever on x86, if you're using XviD plenty have had a stab at optimising it). I'm unsure if it already uses the 2nd core (I doubt it) but it's probably quite a challenge to utilise this within the video encoder.
As a long-time HandBrake user, this is the most exciting thing to happen to it in a long time!
I'm the author of the HandBrake UI redesign and I just wanted to mention that there's a newer version of the NIB here: http://www.macthemesforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=4652
The UI replacement looks pretty good but, I must admit, I love the pineapple/mixed drink icon! I just wish it were a little more photorealistic. The icon is what put it in my dock in the first place.
Hi all,
Phil, cool new icon and great blog! I'll be checking back often.
Everyone else...
Does HandBrake shrink it to 4.37G as well(like DVD2One)? Just to bring up a point Joseph made, "Have you ever used Mac the Ripper"? I average about 23 minutes per DVD using a 1.3G ibook with 1.25 Gig of RAM. If your just now getting 30 minutes on the new Macbook then Mac the ripper should kill on your new machine.
I mean, if it shrinks it too then that's incredible, if not...seems like a waste.
Just a thought.
Phill Ryu
WebSpyderz, Mac the Ripper only rips the DVD"s contents out of the disk. HandBrake also fully encodes it into mpg or avi format, resulting in file sizes as small or large as you want them. I currently rip movies at about 800kbps, which results in roughly 800-1 gig files for most movies at nearly DVD quality.
Love this blog already, bookmarked it straight away. Thanks Phill
OK, cool. Thanks for the clarification. I knew there had to be something I was missing.
Keep on keepin' on!!!!
The logo of the pineapple and drink is a stolen logo. I saw it elsewhere, and thought how funny that a program that helps rips off video has a ripped off logo.
This blog is now my only homepage. I hope you can keep up the great work. Also, I love the site design.
Personally, your new icon is too sterile. There's no fun in it, no life. It looks like an expensive piece of shareware, rather than a good simple utility.
Is a manuel available for the HandBrake application? Thanks, Larry
[...] Pimp Your App: Make HandBrake Dock-Worthy Make the awesome Handbrake DVD-mpeg4 converter look nice! (tags: macosx gui video dvd usability) [...]
I've downloaded the app. The speed increase is really exciting; I'm looking forward to it. Sorry to not be on the "edge"; I don't know where to find the MainMenu.nib file or for that matter--what it is? Sooooo, at the moment I've downloaded an app that I can't use yet. Please help, thanks, Larry
Cool, good information update on Handbrake. The video conversion is great.
If you don't want to put it in your dock, just set it to open whenever you insert a dvd like I do.
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Dylan
July 04th, 2006 at 2:54pmI have a feeling I\'m going to love this blog.